Erkki Salmenhaara (1941-2002) was at one time an avant-garde firebrand, his first three symphonies (1962 64) and some other works employing Ligetian chord clusters and other devices designed to provoke. By the time of Poema in 1975, his eloquent musing on Chopin’s ubiquitous Funeral March, his style had moved into postmodernism, a shift anticipated 10 years earlier. Originally written for violin, the transcription – it’s unclear by whose hands – for cello proves deeply atmospheric in Ylönen’s persuasive hands.

The emotional intensity is ramped up considerably, as one might expect from the title, in Pehr Henrik Nordgren’s HATE-LOVE (1987), though its inspiration was not divulged by the composer. Not the soloist and orchestra, presumably, as this is their second recording of it, this new account markedly quicker than their 1990 predecessor. A single-span fantasia, it packs a more concentrated punch than the Concerto of 2010 by Juho Kangas, born the year after Poema was completed and the son of the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra’s eminent founder-conductor. Its inclusion here is on merit and its volatile outer movements provide much-needed expressive contrast.

Sallinen’s eighth and most recent Chamber Music (2008 09) shows the composer in serious mood commemorating the great writer Paavo Haavikko, so lacks the jaw-dropping japeries of the third in the series, The Nocturnal Dances of Don Juanquixote, also for cello (1983). The only explicitly memorial work, the mood is not exclusively sombre, the single movement’s several sections containing shades of dark and light. Ylönen is a wonderful advocate and his partnership with the Ostrobothnians throughout is hugely eloquent. Alba’s sound is superb.